Reviewed by Michael T. Young
Fragmentation and Volta
by Paul Ilechko.
Gnashing Teeth Publishing
Feb 2025, 110 pages, ISBN: 978-1-966075-00-4, $17.50, paperback
I’ve read Paul Ilechko’s poetry through some of the numerous journals he’s published in, and every time his work delights. So, I was profoundly happy when his recent full-length collection Fragmentation and Volta was published by Gnashing Teeth Publishing.
To enter this book is to dive into a kind of poetic ocean, a lyrical sea of metaphor and association. In fact, I was reminded of a time years ago when my wife and I were at the beach, and we sat in the waves just where they broke on the shore and let the ocean tumble us about in its powerful hands. In some ways, Ilechko’s collection does the same thing, playfully and powerfully jostling us with its leaps and associations.
Starting with the title, we have not merely a heading by which to call the book but an understanding of Ilechko’s poetic strategy, from structural framework to lineation and syntax. What comes to us are bits and pieces, framed chunks and turns of thought that accumulate into an impression:
. . . the sound from the cobbled alleyway seems to be the sounds of murder
or the hellish screeching of wildcat as the man upstairs opens his
window and rages at the world as the gull wheels away a white rag
against the empty sea smoke rising until indistinguishable from cloud. . .(Fragments for Ken Smith: 2, pg 28)
In the first section, Ilechko writes “music cannot exist without the concept of waves.” (Fragments for Ken Smith: 1, pg 6). If one takes a moment to consider the structure of the collection and then the poems within that structure, it’s difficult not to think of waves. There are alternating sections of fragments and sections of crown sonnet sequences, five of the first and four of the second. The fragments are four lines of prose poetry bracketed by ellipses and each fragment is separated by white space on the page so there are no more than 4 fragments to a page. This gives them the look of discrete, topographical waves of text, even as the alternating structure of each section too impresses as waves of alternating form. And then his lines too are segmented into syntactic waves the way he masterfully uses spacing to help us read his poems at the right pace, so that every image and idea laps against the mind like ocean water.
He also crafts certain images and metaphors to resurface. For instance, in the first section of fragments, one begins “. . .there was a route through the mountains.” Two fragments later contains the line “this then was the message brought down from the mountain.” And two fragments after this starts, “. . . they walked across a plain that seemed to stretch into a formless and colorless purity.” So, we begin in the mountains, come down from the mountains with a message, and then walk across a plain. But there is no main character doing this, no “I” narrating progress. These are discrete lyrical utterances that carry us by their movement and nuanced connection. And this keeps it surprising, fresh, a dance we follow along naturally. It’s the music of language and image. Sometimes it’s the internal rhymes as in “silhouetted like a jet plane against a setting/sun.” Or again:
a range of low-slung hills where children clung
tightly to flowering aprons salt spilled on
their morning sandwich
(sonnet with cables, pg. 41)
Sometimes it’s repetition as in
Darkness elliptical darkness pure wet
from the roots darkness cellar-bound in crumbling
stones of ash and moss
And here take note of the masterful pause in the repetition by having the phrase “wet/from the roots” separating the third repetition from the initial two. In every case, we find the movement of a voice assured in its own progress. And this, more than anything, gives the reader the confidence to trust where he is going, much in the way we trust the waves of the sea to always reach the shore. And so, in the voltas, the shifts of thought, even in the crown sonnet sequences, there is not necessarily a governing theme but a progress that leads us to consider a vast range of observations. For example, we encounter “angel sonnet,” the fourth sonnet in the third crown called “The Bitter Clarity,” and here ponder a revision of the idea of guardian angels who aren’t that good at their job. This same sequence of sonnets concludes with “alcoholic sonnet,” which may be one of the best poems I’ve read on the nature of addiction. The line connecting these two poems is not narrative sequence or logical argument but lyrical association. For Ilechko is a lyrical poet par excellence.
While reading Fragmentation and Volta one might be tempted to think there is no governing theme. And in many respects, one would be right. But in another important way, one would be wrong. The clue, as already noted, is the title itself and what is Ilechko’s particular poetic strategy. While most of us, even the most lyrical poets among us, tend to be compulsively driven to find either narrative threads or logical progressions—and one can see this in the many poetry collections published today that seem earnest to display their narrative or logical cohesion—Ilechko is a lyric poet through and through. That is to say, his poems don’t create narrative or logical progressions but find their way by music and metaphor, image and symbol. Each piece of the five sections of fragments are readable in isolation, but there are connections. There is progress the way waves progress, but not in the way a story links events or a philosopher links ideas.
Among some of the reoccurring images or ideas are memory, churches or ruins, and thus a probing of religious questions, and the tenuousness of human connection. But nothing is more threaded through this collection as various forms of borders, edges, of present landscapes being affected or influenced by distant landscapes, things merging, boundaries blurring, and liminal spaces. Here are just a few noteworthy examples:
“. . . the air today tastes thickly of ash from the fires that burn half a continent away.” (Fragments for Ken Smith: 2, pg 25)
“the doors are locked / but the walls are missing” (7. Sonnet for an abandoned building, pg 37)
“many objects which are internal / can be mapped into objects which are external” (14. language sonnet for cloud systems, pg 44)
“. . . landscape absorbs you with its surface.” (Fragments for Ken Smith: 3, pg 47)
the stones from his cemetery leaking onto the
adjacent moor pagan mounds and ancient dividing lines lines that
cross the acres of emptiness and fill it with purpose. . .(Fragments for Ken Smith: 3, pg 47)
He came from a town of unwilling identity
a town without windows or doors (sonnet for the wrong mountains, pg. 75)
In fact, the collection ends on reaching home by crossing an international border.
. . .the train accelerated through the tunnel and crossed the international
border slicing through the pressure of dead air I had been reading and
was surprised by the sudden emergence into the daylight passing the
colorful gardens of the suburbs and on to home. . .
The collection may end with the word “home” but that word is followed by an ellipsis, that punctuation mark which means that something has been left out. Here at the end, it alludes not only to the contents being fragmentary but to the whole collection itself being a fragment. The book itself is a border, a liminal space inviting everything unsaid to gather around it. It knows its limits but embraces those limits as the heart of its aesthetic stance, a space into which insight and revelation are invited and find a home.
About the reviewer: Michael T. Young’s third full-length collection, The Infinite Doctrine of Water, was published by Terrapin Books. His chapbook, Living in the Counterpoint (Finishing Line Press), received the 2014 Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award from the New England Poetry Club. His other collections include The Beautiful Moment of Being Lost (Poets Wear Prada), Transcriptions of Daylight (Rattapallax Press), and Because the Wind Has Questions (Somers Rocks Press). He received a fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Chaffin Poetry Award. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous print and online journals including The Cimarron Review, The Cortland Review, Edison Literary Review, Lunch Ticket, The Potomac Review, and Valparaiso Poetry Review. His work is also in the anthologies Phoenix Rising, Chance of a Ghost, In the Black/In the Red, and Rabbit Ears: TV Poems. He lives with his wife and children in Jersey City, New Jersey.